Quotes from Daniel B. Smith

Courage, the writer Ambrose Redmoon said, "is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something is more important than fear.

Like most clichés, it is fundamentally true that the anxious, the melancholy, the manic, and the obsessed are more likely to become therapists than other people.

By the tie I arrived at the clinic I was typically so demoralized I could barely stand. I was twenty-three years old and I looked like Nixon resigning the presidency.

No one with panic attacks and anxiety has ever gone 'crazy,' " the site claims. "In fact, because you realize that you have panic attacks, this is just another indication that you are not going crazy. People that 'go crazy' lose contact with reality. Anxious people are too much in contact with reality. Thus, people with panic and anxiety problems NEVER 'go crazy.' It simply cannot happen.

If you're afraid of heights, lean over a railing. If you're afraid of germs, lick a floor. But what do you do if your greatest fear is of being afraid?

But a child is a sensitive instrument. You can hide the factual truth from a child, but you can't blanket influence. Your agitation will out, and over time it will mod your child's temperament as surely as water wear at rock.

My mother took the measure of what could be built with the material she'd been given, and she built it.

To be anxious wasn't shameful, it was a high calling. It was to be alive to life's contradictions, more receptive to the true nature of things than everyone else. It was to be a person who saw with sharper eyes with more a active skin.

The problem of anxiety isn't that the organism responds to threats by near-instantly powering up. That's clearly a good thing, species-survival-wise. It's that sometimes the organism starts seeing threats too readily.